


Thimble

by Mikanis (Coagvla)



Category: Peter Pan (2003), Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: Dark Peter Pan, F/M, Hook is a Gentleman, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Neverland (Peter Pan), POV Hook, Pan is a God, Peter Pan is a Little Shit, Underage Kissing, Underage Murder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 05:55:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6317311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coagvla/pseuds/Mikanis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To make him acknowledge that we are not the same, and not on his terms, is an insult of the highest order, and I know the grin on my features is maniacal, but I wish he would fake his own death purely for my satisfaction. Give me a second's pleasure in the idea that I drowned, Peter, Pan.</p><p>---</p><p>Unfinished Short, written in 2009. Someone please bully me into finishing it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thimble

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lywinis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lywinis/gifts).



Thimble  
A lesson in the Cruelty of Children.

\------

XXXX  
  
He’d never match me in anything less than steel. Had I both my hands, and were he unable to count on the clouds to hide him in safety, I could kill him with my bare fists. He’s wiry, lean and built like a runner, though I doubt he can count the hours he spends afoot a week on one hand. I don’t know how he maintains his form, but I know that mine comes from flinging the length of my blade into the space that he occupied seconds before the blow was dealt. If I were able to pin him, perhaps, and beat the sense from his brain so that he did not know up from down, I think I could kill him then, on sheer rage. As it stands, I settle for taking splinters out of my ship with every pass, and watching him weave through the air around me as any mermaid might the sea. He mocks me, crowing with the sun as it glints off my sword, and I hate him. When my arm finally fails; when I bury my hook so far into the grain that I haven’t the strength to pull it away without a breath first, then the game is over and he will leave.  
  
At this point, my goal has shifted from his eventual death to merely outlasting his interest. I stagger, after finally, a two hour stint across my deck, and my blade fails me with a solid flick of his wrist.  
  
“…Damn.”  
  
He pauses, sweating, green eyes glinting in his humor as he catches his breath upon the rigging. “That…is a man’s word.”  
  
He sheathes his sword and leaves me with that, whistling to the others that the fun is over. I hate him.  
  
XXXX  
  
I often muse, in my spare moments of the obsession, just how powerful he truly is in this world. I feel as though I am the spectator of an obscenely elaborate puppet show, and even the sun rises at his whim and sets when he becomes tired. He is Pan, and the world he has crafted for his own amusement lives and breathes with him. In the strictest sense, he is its lord and master, but he only ever asks that he be allowed to live here in his simple arrogance. Oh, the cleverness of Pan, he sings to himself, as he leaves nothing but a rain of leaves and arrows in his wake as he makes off with the Savage Chief’s prized headdress. Oh, the strength of Pan, he mutters under his breath when he disarms me, his eyes bright, his smile the everlasting soul of a child. The creature I see behind those eyes is a god, but he holds his power with all the vindictive cruelty of a child at play. He is probably more just than I give him due credit for because of that trait. He is a boy, and this…this beautiful place is a boy’s world. Even I cannot begrudge him some of the aspects that code entails.  
  
I bathe in the hollow of Croc’s Point, when I have a mind to get away from the ship. The crew doesn’t understand that boiling water doesn’t remove the salt, and that the heat brings an ache to my short wrist that doesn’t help me relax in the least. The Point is a short inlet creek, fed by the mountainside and nested at its base. The river follows the wall of the sharp cliffs until it disappears underground and comes here. I’ve seen him often, from my cabin, skimming the sheer rock face with his fingertips to watch the water spray behind him glisten. Sparks of liquid fire, born from stone for his amusement.  
  
The water is warmer here because of that sunlight, and too shallow to invite the taunts of the mermaids from deeper sea. I am not the only man in Neverland, just the most notorious. I am scarred from many a battle with its master, and the one that cost my hand is a legend among the few peoples that inhabit this world with us. Peace is a rarity, here, and I’m not entirely sure of whom to blame for that failure. Pan is the type to brag, but considering the amount of free will he allows in his creations, I wouldn't be surprised to find that mermaids are terrible gossips, and I know as a point of fact that he and I have sourced many songs for the savage tribes.  
  
I bring my musket, my sword, and my soap and take advantage of the stream where it falls, a small waterfall just tall and slow enough to wash my hair and shoulders before the water laps too highly about my ribs. The point is shaped like the beast that I cannot stand, but this water is too clear for such an animal to make a surprise attack. I still keep my eyes open, however, the water would drown out the clock that is my saving grace. I start at the end of the pool beneath the stone and work my way inward, letting the water take the edge of my pains away. I have to remove my hook and its brace before I can enter too deeply, and loathe as I am to let it rust, I am just as wary of taking it off and baring my back to the wood. Croc’s Point is near enough to beach that I needn’t worry the savages overmuch, but the Lost Boys know no territory. I settle for my dagger and belt around my bare hips when the time comes, leaving the rest beneath the brush on the bank. The soap was made a long time ago, back when the men cared about such things, when my contact with the world was readily available. I haven’t seen the World of Men since 1786, when my obsession drove me here for the last time, and that gate was closed to me. I use it sparingly, as my supply is small. Perhaps when I return, I can convince Smee to bring out his razors and strop to give me a proper shave. The man’s eyesight is failing, but he knows the feel of his razors. He could split a hair with his eyes closed.  
  
The water is so good upon my back. My hair has long been abused by the sea and the wind, a snarled mess of dark curls. It is thick in my fingers as I dampen it for the soap, wishing with a heavy heart for the fine oils that men of standing should have on hand, to soften it again. The thought of golden curls strikes, softer than mine through the virtue of sweat and youth, and my grimace is lost under the waterfall. I am only human, and a man at that, so I am envious of those who still enjoy such things. I am not old, not as old as anyone would believe me to be, but this is a boy’s world, and a day over twenty-five is a day closer to death. He is an immortal with an infallible sense of time passing. It is a cruel thing.  
  
I hate him. Bloody hell, I hate him so much. My nails leave my scalp to press the stone, trusting the weight of the water to sluice the soap away. Even bathing is difficult, what with the useless piece of flesh that is my left forearm. I have ordered my soap cut into smaller blocks, to preserve my supply, and make it easier to keep in my palm while I work it through my hair. There is much of it to clean, but that speaks to my vanity.  
  
He shall not ruin my baths, however. I make my mind up and turn around, throwing the dark mass back over my shoulder. The sun glints golden through the treetops, setting. Pan is growing tired for the day then. He will be resting soon, hidden away in whatever cave beckons such youth to explore…there was a time, not long ago, where the sun did not set for three days. The Lost Boys had found my patch of sugarcane, and the sweetness did much for the fool’s energy. It was most annoying.  
  
As my mind wanders, as always, to thoughts of Pan, the boy appears as though summoned. I reach for my dagger before I realize that he hasn’t seen me. I stand in the hollow of the water and stone, blue eyes narrowed because I am without my hook, and he gains an insidious pleasure from seeing the mark he’s made upon my person. My bones, and my signet ring, lay digesting in the gullet of a crocodile, and that’s just so damnably funny, isn’t it? It’s all I can do to keep the dagger to myself. It was never my best sport, but I am not a bad throw with my right. I watch him hover over the water, his trousers covered in dust and the toil that a youth exerts simply for the sake of doing.  
  
He spins in the air, scanning the tree line and the point for other life. He misses me. A rarity indeed. There is a frown upon his features, one that wrinkles the dust and sweat upon his brow, streaking when he seems to make up his mind about something. He hovers, then soars straight up and backwards, to plummet into the water. He is a streak of green leaves, leather, and bronze beneath the surface as he reaches the bank. The boy emerges and shakes his head and hands, stepping gingerly upon the dirt. A funny little shake, like a dog…a sparrow. He shivers the water from his head to his toes, lifting a foot off the ground to kick it away one foot at a time. He bathes like a sparrow.  
  
He roughs the excess from his hair and casts the water a deadly look before he is gone again, a whisper in the leaves. By the time I finish bathing, the sun has set.  
  
XXXX  
  
I don’t like fighting battles on the ground. Perhaps I limit myself, by keeping our duels out on the ocean, but damn it, I can see him there. He can’t resist showing himself to me, posing upon my ship as though it belongs to him and I’m merely keeping it for the time that he allows. It infuriates me. It allows me to hit him. Here, upon the sand, he’s content to mock me from the trees, sitting in his branches while my men stumble because the solid earth has no heartbeat.  
  
I swear, one day I’ll mow them down with cannon fire.  
  
XXXX

It is cooler beneath Croc’s point than it is on the water. The trees offer shade that I cannot have beneath my sails. I sometimes grow tired of counting my coins and polishing my hooks, and I want away. I go, of course, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t turn up again. I don’t have time to hide behind the curtain of water before he is there. After a moment of posing from us both, our hands at our blades and hard eyes, he decides to wait it out, backing into the branches of the nearest oak to sit and stare. I let the stump trail beneath the pool’s surface, blatantly denying it unto to myself, but it’s a subconscious effort to avoid his mockery. He says nothing. The sun is high, and I know that he is not tired, but perhaps choosing his battles. There is little sport in mocking a cripple...unless, of course, there's an audience.  
  
I move deeper, my soap leaving a trail of blue behind me, and his green eyes narrow in curiosity. It’s scented, a musk that he doesn’t recognize, shouldn’t, because it is a thing of men. Perhaps if I’m lucky, he’ll like it enough to make a flower that imitates it. It’d be a godsend on a ship full of pirates. I go about the lengthy business of washing my hair and his gaze never wavers. After a bit, he drifts quietly from his tree to kneel at the water’s edge, peering after me. He dips his fingers into the water and sniffs them as well.  
“What is that?”  
  
“Soap.”  
  
He backs away as though the dampness on his fingers suddenly burns, sneering. He stands there, defensively, as though waiting for me to demand that he use it as well. I’ll hardly encourage the brat to move from his spot, much less come any closer. I am a one –handed man with a dagger. Pan stares and I stare back, a cool challenge that he doesn’t meet...We are the only light-eyed folk on the island, and that unnerves him. The Lost Boys are of varying blood, and the Indians are dark in hair, skin, and eye. The only other blue eyes on my ship are cataracts.  
  
He watches me bathe, and I keep waiting for him to grow bored and call the others for a bit of sport. See how fast I would run back to the ship, perhaps, or how long they could keep my hook from me before I outright murder one of the smaller boys. It’s all a game to them. I think I’d have to actually gut one of them before the bastard took me seriously…which is a damn shame, because the rest are between the ages of nine and twelve. He is sixteen, and wants all the honor of playing their father, and none of the responsibility. Pan loves nothing, save himself.  
  
He eventually does grow bored of me, but merely turns and leaps into the afternoon sun. I suppose he’ll return after I’ve left to bathe. I debate leaving the soap, just to see if he’d be curious enough to use it.  
  
Perhaps I’m selfish, but my soap is precious to me these days, and I don't.  
  
XXXX  
  
I am not the first to the bathing pool upon the third visit that we cross paths. He has found a scrap of the soap anyway, something that I deemed too small to be bothered with and left upon a stone, and is hovering inches above the water, spinning it with his fingertips. He sneers, at once delighted by the scent and repulsed by the symbol of order. I wait, musket in hand and warm to the touch, for him to look up. His blond curls graze the water as he leans in and sniffs again, poking it beneath the water to watch it float to the top. It’d be an easy shot, to put a ball just between his ribs. See how high he goes before his lungs fill with blood and he plummets to the ground, gasping for air that is not being denied him. The thought makes me smile myself, a curl of the lip that has made grown men cower, and this one turn red in his young rage.  
  
Perhaps the thought was too loud. He looks up, jumping like a startled thrush, and his frame is close enough to the water that it makes a splash, and he falls at the second surprise. Never one to sputter, he makes a dive of it, throwing himself from the pool’s depths into the air and pausing to shake the water from his hair into the sunlight. He hisses lowly at me, and is gone again, vaulting back over the nose of Croc’s Point.  
  
I know Pan enough to know that I’ve embarrassed the lad. It brings me an undue amount of pleasure.  
  
This time, I leave the soap.  
  
XXXX  
  
Something fell from the sky today. Pan has not bothered me in a week.  
  
XXXX  
  
“Why do you take such time?” He asks from the branch, where he has napped for the last half hour. “I’ve no time to keep waiting.”  
  
“You might not wait at all.”  
  
“She insists.” He sits up, scowling at the bark as though it has insulted him. “She’ll not feed me if I’m not clean.”  
  
He speaks here of the girl that he’s adopted.  
  
Wendy. Wendy that fell from the clouds, a girl a shade shy of Pan in years, one that fills the Lost Boy’s heads with stories of grandeur. She compliments Pan’s ego wonderfully, and he’s never been more insufferable. I continue soaping my hair, the small square of soap worn round at the corners upon its string. It hangs from my wrist as I lean to rinse it away. “I’ve never known Pan to suffer any schedule but his own.”  
  
He smiles then, “She likes me. She makes me kisses.”  
  
At that I pause, both at the notion of this boy kissing anything…and the phrasing confuses me as well. How does one ‘make’ a kiss? I repeat this to him, lifting my voice over the rush of water.  
  
He lifts his forearm, shaking a bracelet with many shiny things attached to it. I recognize not a few of the jewels that we’ve been bantering between us for the last hundred years or so. “See? She makes me dozens of them, to show how much she likes me. Everyone likes me…except for you, old fool. And what does your opinion matter?”  
  
He snickers at that. After a moment, his green eyes become brighter; an idea strikes him it seems.  
  
Suddenly, Pan is not in the trees, but racing across the water at me. Cursing, I have my blade out and up before I can recognize that he’s not even looking at me. I feel his trousers catch on it, but he’s already up and away, hissing. “What was that for?! I’ve not touched you!”  
  
He’s bleeding, though not badly, from his thigh. My block of soap is captive in his fist, dangling by the rope Smee melted into it for my benefit. He frowns, the wind picking up as he inspects the cut, and in God’s name, that’s all the justification he’d need wouldn’t he? That he’d touched me first. I don’t think he understands that I aim for his heart.  
  
He sneers at it, the pain and the blood, at once a weakness and glory in the way that young boys see such things. “Hmph.”  
  
“Give it back.”  
  
To my utter surprise, he dips a forearm into the pool, and then rakes the small bar across it. He sniffs his own skin, to insure the scent held, perhaps, and then drops it back to the water, kicking it to me in a spray. “There. S’all I wanted, Hook. The smell’s enough to confuse her.”  
  
And he’s gone then, nothing but my poor soap bouncing on the waves of his leaving, and a cloud of red to mark where he’d waited before. He’ll tell boys it was some grand ambush waiting. The sanctity of my pool is lost. I’ll have hell in the morning.

  


XXXX  
  
On a rare occasion, I find myself in a mood to clean. Rather, I set the crew to cleaning and disappear to fulfill my own definition of the rite. I have Smee sweep out the office and beat the mattress, while I sort through my journals, correcting dates and adding final tallies to the death tolls between my ship and the tribe. I am sure it has not gone unnoticed by the savages either, but the Lost Boys never suffer any losses. We’re simply expendable, I’d imagine. Today, Smee has finished and is playing the pipes out on the rigging, and doing so poorly. I shut all but my back windows, in hopes to drown the sorry screeching out, but aside from the occasional overhead thump from a mop bucket, there is nothing I can do. It’s a bit grating, but it makes the men move a little faster.  
  
Once again, no sooner does that insipid smirk come to my memory than it materializes itself in my presence. Pan has never dared to enter my cabin before, but I suppose the open windows were just too tempting. The sunlight flickers briefly, and my papers fly away across the freshly brushed floor, and not before my quill leaves a dark mark through the passage I was editing. Rolling my eyes, I stand up and turn in one motion, aiming for the boy’s feet as I loose the ball.  
  
The gunpowder cracks and he jumps above the shot, kicking the chair into my stomach.  
  
It is at this point that I realize that, one, he is not laughing or even smiling really, and two, he has very possibly splintered my shin. The sun is not flickering with a shadow, it has disappeared, and the darkness carries on, out to the ocean. His face is tight, two bright spots of color high in his cheeks as he stands there, for all appearances fuming. It is the first time I have seen this heat brought about with nary an effort on my part.  
  
I don’t know what Wendy did, but in this moment, I might kiss her hands for it. This is an intriguing side of Pan, one that is so rare, it’s said that a storm is as common as a woman, in Neverland. The irony of it is telling.  
  
“What in God’s name do you want?”  
  
He stands there for a moment longer, and his green eyes burn brighter than my lanterns, than the morning sun on the forest canopy. “She…gave me a thimble.”  
  
Is it my fault that all reasonable thought stopped with that statement? Truly? A short bark of a laugh fell from my lips, because my knees hurt so damnably as a sign of my age, and she gave him a thimble? The audacity of the situation, of Pan, in my cabin, over something as trivial as a sewing thimble?  
  
“What idiocy do you bring to my ship?” It is an honest question, asked in pure curiosity, because I've often wondered what would draw the boy so deep into my presence as to have the illusion of privacy, but now that I have it, the wicked tortures I'd thought to exact are not at the forefront of my mind, where they should be.  
  
My amusement thoroughly enrages him, it's delightful, and he stomps his foot, shaking his curls out of his eyes while he draws the air to huff, “A thimble, Hook. Isn’t funny!”  
  
“So get rid of it. I haven't the time for this.”  
  
“You don’t…understand, I can’t give her a thimble, it’s like…It’s…Oh, never mind, old man.”  
  
And he is gone, again, with the sound of rolling thunder in his wake, a dragonfly racing the rain. I gather my papers and settle myself for a storm, refusing to mull over the fact that the exchange was yet another that could be mistaken for a civilized conversation.  
  
XXXX  
  
The sea is rough. The men resign themselves to it, on sheer principle, because they’ve all sailed a hard sea before, but again…a storm is a rare thing. It’s a stretch of memory that eventually brings them around to lashing things down and tying lines to their posts. We’d almost forgotten what the metal cap on our mast was for, until the first bolt of lightning hit it and our watchman screamed in his terror. We laughed at him, but all turned a wary eye to the clouds after his miss.  
  
I remain at my desk, where Pan left me upon his last intrusion. I have lashed the windows open, because I find the sound of the storm refreshing. Even the motion of my ship has granted me new energy. My pages are neatly weighted down with the various trinkets adorning my desk, even the prototype of my first hook. I have the blade off now, reclining in my shirt and beltless, with the rounded version in the brace. The storm has lowered the temperature slightly, but it is still too warm in my cabin, and I’m a man that likes comfort where I can find it. A gentleman’s habits die hard.  
  
The storm and the sea quiet for a moment. A breeze at the back of my neck follows the thought, and a limber figure darts around my affairs to hover. Pan crouches upon the corner of my desk, a bedraggled hawk with his golden skin and damp curls hanging long about his ears. For a moment, a shadow of his features, he looks older. It passes. He glances over the papers carefully, though I know he can’t read or write. Then, when I don’t question his sudden appearance quickly enough, he sighs dramatically, cutting those emeralds in my direction as though I should give a damn about his motives. I hate him.  
  
“Give me a reason not to shoot you.”  
  
“You'll miss. Like always. I want to talk.”  
  
“About?”  
  
“…Man. Things of Men.”  
  
I open my mouth to tell him where to put his hands so he can otherwise amuse himself, but he cuts me off, raking his dirty nails through his hair, half-pulling, “I don’t understand her.”  
  
…I pause. Perhaps this Wendy will be of more use to me than I thought. He gathers his thoughts to continue, and I put my quill down with a bitten tongue, trying hard to gather my patience…no small feat, I might add, when this boy makes his living wearing it to nothing.  
  
“She…gives me kisses, and thimbles, and stories, and wants to change things.” He rants, balancing on his toes and gesturing grandly. Pan is always loud. “I don’t understand. I don’t want to. She complicates things, simple things…good things, and she changes them. Makes them harder. Makes them…important.”  
  
He cannot sit still when he is angry. In the next breath, he is up and about the floor, pacing and hovering at the same time walking the air four inches above the ground. “She has cleaned the Burrow. Cleaned it, Hook, I cannot find my pipes! She makes us wash, she tucks us in, gives us medicine. And kisses…and thimbles…”  
  
-He leaps across the desk to perch on my knee, waving that hideous bracelet before my eyes. His feet are warm on my left knee, and he is light, so light that it surprises me more than his sudden closeness does. He weighs nothing, but his eyes are very heavy. “And these, are supposed to make amends? She says she likes me, more than anyone in the world, but she is so…strange.”  
  
“And you came here...?” I offer, eyes narrowed, because none of this has anything to do with me. The last three centuries, we’ve spent playing a ludicrous game of murder, and he expects it to be set aside because he deems it unimportant at the moment? Three hundred years of slaughter in the name of mischief irrelevant because a girl confuses him? He can go home and play Father, for all I care. The words are on my tongue when it suddenly dawns on me that that is the trouble. This girl…she makes his game a little too real for his comfort. She threatens him. I can’t begin to imagine how he’s been toying with her, because for all his arrogance and treachery, Pan is innocent. He is the breath of life, and incorruptible. He ruins my sanity with the precision of a mad dog, and it’s all good sport to him, but he’s calling a bracelet and its charms ‘kisses’. He’s... completely clueless. Just a boy.  
  
“Because you do not complicate things." He says bluntly, pulling the bracelet back and toying with an emerald the size of my eye. He's almost sullen, "You know the difference between a thimble, and a thank you.”  
  
I nod dumbly, to this, because I still haven’t the slightest clue as to what he’s talking about, or why this girl carries so many thimbles in her nightgown.  
  
It occurs to me then, that if she’s misinformed him on the matter of kisses, then perhaps she has done this as well with-  
  
“Tink hates the thimbles. The first time Wendy tried it, Tink pulled half her hair out.”  
  
I’m almost sure of it then, a thimble is some outward sign of affection. Fairies are jealous things. I’m almost nearly as sure that I don’t give a damn. I really don’t, and he’s far too damned annoying to be this close to me. It makes the damaged nerves in my forearm itch.  
  
He cocks an eyebrow expectantly; jingling the stones, “So, talk to me of Man things. I am curious.”  
  
And there, put simply, is an example of his madness. We do not have our blades out, and that seems to mean a lull in the situation for him…that is not our dynamic. I can handle Pan murderous and insipid, but conversation brings a note of civility that the boy can never hope to allude to. I should never have encouraged this. “No.”  
  
He looks wounded, green eyes going wide at my solid refusal. I imagine he doesn’t get told ‘no’ very often. There are a few other words I would attach to that one, but he’d laugh. And call me old. “Why not?”  
  
“You wouldn’t understand if I tried.”  
  
He looks stricken, “That’s not true! I could be a…a man, if I wanted. But I don’t!”  
  
“That has nothing to do with this.”  
  
His eyes narrow then and he falls silent for a breath. “Maybe you just don’t know. Is that it, Captain James Hook? You won’t talk because you don’t know how to handle her either.”  
  
There’s a flash of entertainment in his eyes, and the rain stops, the churning of the water below calming somewhat. His balance never falters, and I suppose it doesn’t have to, since he has no concept of gravity. I brace my forehead in my fingers, because I know it’s coming, and I don’t want it to.  
  
It starts as a giggle, a low chuckle from deep in his chest as he bites his lip and lowers his head, craning his neck to keep my eyes. I can see the sun coming back, into his features, and I hate him. God, I hate him and his ability to manipulate the sea at will. “You don’t know, do you? Here I thought you a Man, but no, you’re just old aren't you? And stupid. You know nothing of thimbles and kisses and-“  
  
And he sounds like damned idiot, babbling on and somehow managing to insult me when there’s nothing but drivel on his tongue. I take a deep breath, his words falling away into a drone at that point, because I can’t hear them over the buzz of my own irritation. He wants a rise out of me. He wants me to vindicate this, wants another grand tale of near-escape and violence, and I get so damned tired of watching this game play out. He knows my temper, gave me my weakness by driving me half out of my honor, and now he plays upon it without mercy. I will grit my teeth as long as I can stand it, because there’s despair in knowing that so many times he has driven me to violence and my very release is my downfall. So many times, I have lost everything that makes me a civilized man, and I have nothing to show for it. I’d love to slit his throat and he perches there, speaking to me of his feelings and claiming I don’t know the meaning of the word, when I have watched countless men seize and sink with their screams still bubbling to the surface…that it hurts me because I don’t know what it is to be loved, to be wanted. I let him ramble on, until a glance to port makes me realize that the cloud cover is breaking up as well, batches of sunlight dappling the ocean's surface.  
  
Bloody hell, I've tasted enough of my own madness, basked and bathed and drowned in this pain, why not show him what he inflicts but can never share or understand? I lift my hook and throw it around the back of his throat. He doesn’t know the meaning of want, of feelings, he has never felt anything. His words cut off in a sharp cry, emerald eyes wide in surprise, but my right hand has already stolen his dagger and continued around his waist, pulling him off my knee and into the depth of my lap. It’s awkward, and infuriating, because had I both hands, it wouldn’t be. He smells of sun and sky, and his breath of spice, his skin covered in the faint layer of dirt that I’ll always associate with the boy. He fights, once his dagger is away and he regains the thought to, but I take it from him easily enough by angling the sharp point of my hook into his soft underthroat and lifting his chin, covering that infuriating mouth with my own.  
  
He stills instantly, the stunned pulse of power echoing in my lap makes my chest lock. It’s more gratifying that I care to confess, and the charms on that damned bracelet sound like fairy wings when he clutches at the chair’s arms, because I know I’m a far sight better at this than any slip of a girl would prove to be. I, a man, know of things that he cannot fathom. He seems to acknowledge that as I press my mouth to his solidly, insistent, pervasive strokes against warm skin that tastes wonderful, tastes like the rotten cords of my honor. His heart races, I can feel it beating through my sleeve as I hold him there and bid him to open his mouth to me. His green eyes close, a small sound in his chest as he parts them tentatively to let me in, seeing what I’ll do. He’s allowing this, I know he is, but I don’t really care. This is the only God to me, the only one to make his presence known, and this is cruelty of a variety he could not come to on his own. I will not ask what that makes of me. I continue to tease the outer corners of his mouth with my own, simple touches, to add kindle to his interest, because he wants things of Man, and I can kill him with this. It seems to work, because he shifts around in my lap, removing the barrier of his shoulder between us to see what will happen, and he’s so nervous, it’s…good. The relish I take in his submission is not human. He weighs nothing, the barest pressure at my thigh, but he’s so tense that his stomach is taut as stone, the power of his blood singing to mine and making my head spin, ready to move, to fly, to run…  
  
I grant him the attention, letting my tongue dip to touch his lips. He starts, his breath shattered, and the reek of innocence is like a balm to my psyche, because this…this he cannot mock. This is something he has not done, something his is unwilling to test himself because it isn't simple. This is a thing of Man. This is what he asked me for.  
  
He waits, as still as I’ve ever seen him, his knuckles white on my chair, and I offer it again. He shivers, but deems it pleasing, and the part of his mouth widens for me, his breath warm. I pull back, away, and he follows after. Golden lashes lift, and his eyes are so heavy, and so purely green they might have truly been a precious stone, hazed and confused, and asking why-  
  
I go back to him, and why not? He makes another sound, something a little more desperate, confused, as I part his lips by force and dip inside to take what I want from him. He tastes of the winds that fill my sails, the sunlight that warms my skin, and the green leaves of Neverland and the spite of the fairies. He tastes of innocence, and life, life unspoiled by blood and war and hunger, and I want it. More of it, more than this taste that I’m granting myself, because this is Pan as I have never known him, never seen, never thought possible. The sun comes back, glistening off the water, and the boy moves, shrinking beneath the sudden heat of my touch…he shies from me. His entire body warms, I can feel it, that thrum of power a dull roar in my ears now, and the small sounds come louder, until I’m nearly convinced I can taste his pleasure. It wouldn’t surprise me.  
  
After a moment of that, drunk with it, I take a clean breath to return to myself and ease the curve of my hook from his throat, throwing him roughly from my lap. I turn my closed eyes towards the window and the sunlight beyond it as he catches himself somewhere between my desk and the floor, startled. Upon turning back once I’ve calmed myself, he seems to be having a much harder time of it, his lips swollen and his breath erratic. I toss his dagger over my shoulder, towards the veranda windows, muttering, “Go home.”  
  
“…Your-” He’s shaking, but he lifts into the air, rubbing the mark of my hook in his throat. He shakes his head like a dog, clearing it of water, leaps over my head. I hear the blade come off the wood, but I don’t turn. Pan isn’t angry, anymore. I'm not entirely sure which of us is more confused by that.  
  
He pauses, just a moment longer, and finishes breathlessly. “Your thimbles are nicer than Wendy’s.”  
  
So...that is a thimble, then.  
  
XXXX

  


We are docked when I next see the lord of Neverland. The insipid little fool knows no doors, no boundaries within his realm. The moon is high upon the sea, trickling like finely woven silver over the waves when I first open my eyes to the night. A low mist curls around the bows of the Jolly Roger, taken out to the water by a warm breeze from the land. I lift slightly from my pillows, turning to the other side, and the weather is…odd. It rains there, upon the shore; I can see it falling upon the black sand. The trees dance, dark silhouettes below the darker crest of the mountain.  
  
Something, perhaps a sound, perhaps the grace of God, bids me to turn over in my sheets, and Pan is there. He hovers over my bed, sitting in the fashion of the savages upon his cushion of nothing, balancing the point of his dagger upon a fingertip. His expression gives me pause, again, for the second time in the entirety of our history. I have not seen him this calm since he considered the ring upon my severed hand before throwing it to the crocodile. Instinct bids me to reach for the musket hidden beneath my pillow but his eyes ask only for my silence. The melancholy in his features gives him the illusion of years not his own, and not for the first time…I see a glimpse of the man the boy might become. If he were not a god, content to play his child’s games.  
  
He moves, turning his chin slightly to drift backward and seat himself upon the footboard of my bed. He plants a foot upon the post and watches me carefully, the moon on his dagger a cruel entity in itself. I remember that blade, how it feels upon my skin, through it, catching on bone when the flesh gives way. Slowly, I ease to sit up, and he says nothing, still. I have no words to break that stare. I truly don’t. The land reflects his mind as well as a mirror, and I know that he is tired, and troubled, and thinking and this is perhaps the most mature moment I’ve ever encountered him in. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, because that means that it’s a decision on his part. I wonder often to myself of the man he would become. The child is cruel enough to take my hand without remorse, or pity…what sort of man is born from that?  
  
Pan is never one for silence, no matter his mood. “A thimble does not make me a Man.”  
  
There is a pause, and I hold my tongue, because that tone says that he's trying to believe that statement, and I haven’t the patience to argue with him. It is late enough to be early, and my hook is in the case, out of reach. He continues, dropping my eyes to consider his knife again, and I get the sense that it is somehow a part of this conversation, and it is not the first one that it’s participated in. “I think we know that…or else I’d be dead already.”  
  
There is a lot to that statement. Pan would die before growing up…or growing up would kill him. I lean towards the latter.  
  
“There are things of Man that I wish to know…things that Wendy claims would kill me. She says that I cannot stay a boy and become a Man at once. Feelings, she said, are what keep me a child. I have never loved anything. Not her, not my fairy, not anything.”  
  
The way he’s looking at the dagger begs to differ, but I will not make that remark aloud.  
  
“But I can have both.” He smiles then, slowly. There is a quiet spark in his eyes that speaks a language I do not understand, and have no hope of comprehending. The wisdom of children, the logic of their guiltless minds, is beyond me. “I can have both, I know it.”  
  
He gives a silent chuckle, his smirk never failing as he takes the dagger by the hilt again, ending its perpetual dance of balance upon his fingertip. His green eyes are darker in the shadows of my cabin as he turns them back to me. “You shouldn’t sleep so heavily, pirate. I might have killed you.”  
  
“A dagger betwixt my ribs in sleep is poor sport, boy.”  
  
He nods slowly, bringing the bare pads of his feet to my blanket. “Aye. I suppose it is, but the thought crossed my mind.”  
  
I don’t draw my lines so high as to think that it didn’t, either. “You’d take my last hand before you took my life with so little fight.”  
  
He seems to consider this, his eyes lighting at the thought of the challenge. The emeralds fall to my fingers, splayed across the sheets at my waist, and it’s all I can do to keep from clenching them to my side. I’ve no idea what brought that notion from the hall of horrors in my head, but he seems to be following my train of thought. His smile fades slightly. “I doubt you’d be fun anymore.”  
  
It still…strikes me, that that is truly what this amounts to in his head. What is fun and what is not, what is bold and daring, and what is boring and adult. The lines he draws are insane, inhuman, and so lacking in human morality that it’s shocking to know that he has a strict code of honor. They all do, however twisted and morbid it may be. At the moment, it’s the reason I’m still breathing.  
  
I’ve never known Pan to be still in his thoughts, no matter how heavy they may be. I’ve certainly never seen him like this, and it begs the thought, what is he even doing out of bed? Why has the sun remained away, instead of dragging the rest of us from our beds as well? The question I am truly asking is why he wishes that it remain dark, but I can't bring myself to put those words to the wondering. There is something wrong here and it leaves a bitterness in my mouth that no food could give me.  
  
Pan sits there, merely breathing for a moment, with his eyes upon my five fingers, and his toes lightly against my blankets. He is not ready to end this, whatever this is, and my brace is upon the desk, the hook in its case. I’ve nothing but the gun beneath my pillows, yet, there is no inclination to fight in his features. Slowly, I move to lie back again, sighing under the weight of that stare because whatever is on Pan’s mind, I must wait it out until I manage to get my hands upon the musket…and that’s if the powder hasn’t slipped the barrel from my tossing in the night. It’s a further sobering thought, but perchance I could bluff him. The boy has no fear. Of anything.  
  
Perhaps that’s why, on a night like this, I feel like less of a coward for harboring the sliver that is my fear of him. It’s a cold thorn in my heart, but a sixteen year old boy took my hand from me and laughed as they rowed away, trying to stem the blood flow as I dipped in and out of consciousness. He is not human.  
  
Though, tonight, I might be wrong.  
  
“Perhaps.” He starts, and pauses, the word falling from a deep breath. “I should kill you.”  
  
“Perhaps you might try.” I return quietly, my eyes upon the ceiling because I’m not entirely sure I care to see that pregnant look again. It has brought me only pain in the past. “If you’re in the mood.”  
  
“Aye, a mood.” He agrees, and the faintest shift of the bed brings me from the mattress an inch or two again, tense, but the dagger is away, clutched in his fist as he eases to his knees above my ankles. He tilts his head, and that damned look will be the stare I get as I lay dying, I swear it…  
  
Children shouldn’t play with dead things. He mutters under the rain that’s followed him from the shore, pattering faintly against the window along my bedside now. “Perhaps I’ll bring a savage in, to strip you of all this skin.”  
  
And in that moment, something in his tone makes me entirely uncomfortable. I back onto my elbows, my hand slipping beneath the cool fabric until it finds wood and metal and gripping it. His eyes travel the breadth of my chest, the nicks and cuts he’s so fond of marking me with standing dully against my skin in the shifting light. The rain leaves shadows over his features that give him years he doesn’t deserve. Years that he can’t have. I don’t answer that, because it’s not like Pan to offer my death to another, even in jest. We’ll dance until he grows bored, and then one of us will end it. Our opinions in that matter differ greatly, but it is study for another day.  
  
He shifts, bringing the dagger up and I see that his hand is shaking as Pan’s never does. Every muscle in my frame tightens, my mind’s eye already watching it plunge into the soft skin of my belly, but I’ll not wear my armor to bed, no matter how he comes to torment me. My grip is so rough, I can feel the ice in my knuckles, but something…something makes me pause. He’s not here for that, I know he isn’t, and whatever he’s here for-  
  
He shifts to drive its point into the wood of my window sill. His fingers leave it reluctantly, but his eyes return to mine as they come to rest tips light against the tops of my thighs. “I want a thimble.”  
  
My eyes betray me, I have often been told, and shock is a pervasive thing regardless. He waits expectantly, but God in heaven, I cannot move. I cannot breathe to tell him no, I cannot leap to throw him upon his ear, I cannot think to know that I’m supposed to do ...either of these things, his eyes are so dark. There’s a world beyond my windows that lives and breathes with this creature, and I constantly remind myself that he is a child, he chooses to be a child, but that is not a child’s request. I hadn’t meant to make an impression on the boy. I want to move my thumb to cock the musket’s trigger, but I can’t feel it anymore. He waits, and then blinks slowly, leaning forward to place his hands along my sides. I can feel the breeze, through the veranda doors, and it’s not a mere wind tonight, it’s the brush of his thoughts as it moves, and that’s wholly…wrong.  
  
I think I manage to shake my head…turn it at least, as though to guard my mouth from the look it’s receiving, the devil himself asking favors from a dead man. Pan’s expression darkens to something I can’t read, and he lowers his chin, eyes moving over my shoulders and chest and stomach again. It’s near enough to make me writhe. He’s wearing himself tonight, either unknowing or uncaring as to how he affects the Neverland. I can feel him, pressing at my thoughts, at my being as though he wishes to mould me as well, take me apart even further and rebuild me...or not. Curiosity in Pan is a dangerous trait. I want him gone, he needs to leave.  
  
“I want a thimble, Hook.” He tells me again, and drives me to answer, dips to brush that mouth and its demands just over my navel in a hot breath-  
  
“No.” If I’d had the gun ready, I’d have fired it in my shock, my grip tight and trigger pulled…I’d have hit the headboard, I think, if anything.  
  
He pauses, his green eyes lifting to watch me, and he does it again, in a different place, brushing them over one of his scars, muttering as though it’s simple- “Yes. Give it to me.”  
  
I cannot breathe. I cannot. “Why?”  
  
Again, a faint touch of heat, soft and wet and asking quietly what his voice is demanding in whispers, and it will drive me mad, it will. I’ve been living centuries longer alone and battered than any free man would if this were a just and proper world. I spend my days fighting a demon that wears a child’s mask and varies between the intensity of a murderer and the innocence of a boy given free roam of the woods. This line is sacred between us, because Pan is never one and not the other, he chooses to be impossible to understand. I feel myself shiver beneath this touch, and another follows, higher, at the curve of my rib. He asks, but he comes no closer, and I don’t understand this side of Pan. I don’t like it.  
  
“Wendy…shows me.” He breathes, for all the world, a wildcat crouched over my body, as safe as I feel in the seconds that he lowers his eyes to my skin, bringing a hand to trail his fingers down my chest, my stomach, and this is madness- He can’t…be this. “Things that I adore, and then she tells me that I cannot have them. She teases. Like you.”  
  
There is thunder upon the water, the weight of the storm settling upon the deck of the Jolly Roger as surely as he shifts his weight to one palm (all of it, he’s not bothering to hover), and touches me with the other. Were there a clock in my cabin to mark time stopping, it might have, the moment those dark fingers descended past the line of the sheets and across my hips. “Just like you…in the moment before the trigger clicks, and I wait within your sights to see if I can dodge the shot, one more time, and you stare…and you wait, because you don’t know if I can do it either…”  
  
He lifts his eyes to mine, resting the full weight of his hand over the length of me, and damn me, but I cannot think to comprehend his words, to follow his logic in this, because it’s broken, everything about him is broken. I feel that touch to my core, and yet I don’t, I can’t understand his words because this isn’t what Pan learned from me. Clarity eludes me like the sun eludes the sky. “…and your eyes laugh at me.”  
  
He pauses, lowering his eyes to his own hand, and low shivers are thrumming from that touch, but I don’t dare acknowledge them. No. No, no, no I won’t fall this far, he can’t drown me with that stare, no matter what my heart seems to think. This is not my death. Therefore, this does not matter to him. I am not going to allow him any more of me; no further piece of my mind will break under these pretentious gambits he creates to tear at me. I can’t comprehend his mind, I have long given up the effort to do so, but that leaves me living every moment wondering how much more of his imagination I’ll entertain in a world where boredom means destruction. Thimbles… this… I had not seen coming.  
  
His voice is quiet. “It is a powerful thing. I wish to try it. I can feel it, when she touches me. It builds low in my stomach and the world is very bright, very sharp and warm and it’s like…flying into the sun. She tells me no, it is a thing of Man, and the teasing is over…but I can have both. From you. Can’t I? I can learn.”  
  
Learn? There is a ghost of a smile, hidden in his lips as he considers the faint touch before deepening it to stroke me fully, feeling out the contours of a man with his fingertips. I arch nigh off the blankets, my breath deserting me as any of my crew might, and oh God…oh God, he can’t-  
  
“I want a thimble, Hook. Give it to me.”  
  
His mouth, that mouth, is on my skin again, placing kisses, thimbles, freely above the pale fabric at my hips, shifting upwards and, his hand, his hand, his hand is-  
  
“Give it to me, or I will tease, like Wendy, and learn for myself…I am not afraid.”  
  
The world has cracked. This is…broken, glass grating together in the back of my head, a high, shrill roaring that makes Long Tom a whisper in the dark. He wishes to learn this, Wendy has started him down a path that will be the death of us both because I cannot do this. I make a desperate grab for my sanity, and a desperate sound in my throat, because my blood is agreeing all too readily with the idea of how far this boy will break. I touched on the start of the damage, I believe, but Wendy is going to do me an honor by waltzing this demon into a coffin of his design. He doesn’t know what he asks of me. He doesn’t. I repeat this, over and over, in my head, because my honor is in tatters perhaps, but it’s still in my pocket. The musket is heavy is my hand, the fingers numb in their grip as they finally pull it into view.  
  
I place the barrel directly between the lad’s eyes, pressing it there to keep my bloody grip from shaking. A deep breath, two, and his eyes are on mine, the look on his face some beautiful bastard of anger and disappointment. I don’t attribute my tone entirely to my frustration. “I’ll not allow this. I am no girl, to please your whims, and I’ll not tolerate the notion I see in your eyes, Pan. Get out.”  
“Your eyes are bright, like the sky without clouds, Hook.” He growls at me, pulling away with his mind upon the barrel, because we both know that even he can’t dodge a shot like this. “It’s a notion in your head, if not one for the moment.”  
  
“Get out.”  
  
He drifts away, plucking his dagger from the sill in passing. I hold the shot until he finally turns his back to me and strides to the door and away, a dark figure against a darker skyline. I don’t bother to lock the veranda doors after him, or even leave my bed.  
  
Like the coward that I am, I merely turn to the window again, curling around the scent of rain and the gentle ache that has settled low in my head.  
  
XXXX  
  
Neverland sits in a perpetual dawn. The faint warmth the sun grants from brushing the horizon is not enough to fend off the chill of the infrequent rains. It is similar to the sudden freezing weather that follows one of his excursions to the Land of Men. I know better, sitting my study and trying to keep my eyes off the amber glint on the water…Pan is with us, though where his mind is I cannot begin to fathom.  
  
Nor my own, if I care to be honest with myself.  
  
XXXX  
  
“It will happen.” His eyes are bright, brighter than I ever recall them being and the sun is so hot through the heavy fabric of my coat. My hook grates down the edge of his sword, hissing like an offended snake, and the vibration rattles nerves that never did quite heal. I know immediately what he speaks of, despite the heat, and despite the fact that my ship is suddenly swarming with boys and slingshots, swords and stuffed animals.  
  
The sun came with a vengeance echoing him. I know better than to doubt the bright sparks in his eyes. He would kill me today, out of frustration, in a fury only heightened by a certain sandy-haired bitch that waits in the woods, biting her nails because she can’t leave well enough alone-  
  
“I swear it will not, Pan, you will not make a fool of me twice.” My hook runs out of sword and his blade clicks a button from my coat in an attempt to open my belly upon the deck. My arms scream at me that it’s too hot, it’s too much too quickly, but Pan isn’t listening. “Why today Pan, why now? What has she done?”  
  
His sword flashes fire, and his shoulders glint in the sunlight, his curls dark and heavy with his own sweat, but his anger will not cease, and nor shall I, for every step that I stumble back across the wood has my own temper flaring. “Has she filled you full of thimbles and sent you on your way?”  
  
“Shut up, Pirate!” My arm comes down but he is already gone, and there is more than anger in his voice, there is pain. The turmoil around us never ceases, and to my left I see a small body flung overboard, clutching his arm and laughing as he hits the water. Pan is up, around me like a cloud and the point of his blade drives its way through the fabric at my elbow. The metal is cold against my skin, a warning. He yells for silence, but it is his sword that makes the demand.  
  
XXXX  
  
They leave us like this, diving over my railing like rats in assorted furs and leathers. My eyes are blurry with the heat, and my chest feels as though it will cave in upon my heart, but they’re leaving now. My sword hits the deck and Smee is at my side in an instant, pulling the long coat from my shoulders to bare the thin linen beneath to the sun. It clings to me in my sweat, and there at my side in blood. I’m running out of shirts. He gathers the coat and sword while I take a look at my crew, mentally counting heads. I don’t know the names of half these men, but I know what they look like and who’s missing. A group of five hover over a prone figure and I know by the pool he’s lying in that I’ve lost at least one. The first glance puts the tally closer to four, but I’m not sure if that last is actually bleeding. I take a deep breath, my eyes cutting across the tree line, but nothing greets me but the breeze. The heat has left to some degree, the blinding humidity gone to give us lighter air to breathe...Pan's temper has worked itself away to a coal.  
  
Smee calls the ship’s attention to a corner, behind the powder barrels. He’s got my hat in one fist, peering through his dusty glasses at the lump of breathing fur at his feet. Raccoon skins stitched together with leather cording lay there, drawing air with a faint whimper. The lad’s eyes are closed, the grey tufted with blood from his brow, missing in places from the edge of a dagger.  
  
“Is he armed?”  
  
“Nah, Cap’n, jus’ a bag o’ marbles at his hip.” Smee rolls the boy over and the brown eyes open, glassy and unseeing in his pain his temple split wide from a crack across the brow. He’s scrawny, and small…perhaps five skins make that outfit, six at the most. “What say?”  
  
“I know that ‘un.” A voice from the crew, a man standing with his arms crossed over the body. “They calls ‘im Tootles.”  
I nod at the information, my eyes again falling to the figure at that man’s feet before shifting back to the one at Smee’s. His old black eyes are soft. He wonders as often as I do what sort of morbid game we’ve become trapped in, where this is acceptable, watching children bleed.  
  
“Cap’n, I says we kill ‘im.” The same man speaks again, his tone rough and his cheek darkening in a bruise. “What’s a mark in ‘is books for once? String his corpse off th’ prow like a coon aught be hung.”  
  
There’s a general mutter of agreement, one that ends with a wave of my hand. It’d be fair. By all means, in this savage place, it would be fair. Pan wouldn’t blink at the logic, only come sounding off the shore in a blind rage, as it ought to be…as it’s always been. Smee’s rolling the bag of glass in his fingers, and it sounds like a crying fairy, the marbles clinking inside the leather pouch. I shake my head. “He’s a boy.”  
  
“Pan’s a boy.” Another voice lifts from over my shoulder, indignant. “Pan, wot took your hand, Cap’n, he’s a boy too!”  
  
“They all be boys, Cap’n. They kill like men. Why not treat ‘em like men…S’what they want, right?” The man meets my eye again, and there’s blood spatter drying across his chest. He stands there, and presumes to speak to me of Pan and his boys, as though he knows them as well as I do. At this point, he likely does, but that’s not the matter at hand.  
  
“No.” I say it once, and it is the last time I will say it. Tootles breathes shallowly, his brown hair clinging to his forehead, and mishap fur glued to his chest. I can feel the tension ripple through the men as tangible as my hook sliding down the length of Pan’s sword. “He’s seven. Pan is a lad yes, but no child…he’s a demon wearing a boy’s face to play his games. This one…he’s just entranced by what he sees. Pan offers immortality, a guiltless life of adventure, and we pay the price for it. This boy…he doesn’t know. We’ll not kill him.”  
  
“Soon, won’t be a crew to fight ‘em, sir. We keep takin’ these losses, bodies in the water…it’s a war we’re gon’ lose.”  
  
“We lose the war when we lose ourselves, gentlemen. Pan will be back for him…it’s another chance to settle scores.”  
  
“Ye aim to draw him back?” The incredulous tone annoys me to every extent. I cut my eyes in the general direction of the sound, and the men shrink away. I am not to be trifled with. Smee is watching the crew carefully, in his way, the long feather of my hat trailing the ground near his ankle, its thin spine broken in the fall from my head.  
  
The musket comes from the holster easily enough, and the crew quiets instantly. Our losses are not always due to Pan’s temper alone…I have listed my fair share on that tally. I turn to the rest of them, all sixty perhaps, that remain, and lift my voice. “When they fight like men, we will honor them with a man’s death. What lies at my feet is not a man.”  
  
I lower the pistol and fire, carefully, putting the ball in the wood just beside the boy’s ear. The pain in his head has made him weak, and the sound works its trade. Tootles shies away from the shot with a pathetic cry, his small fists coming to cover his eyes as he curls up and sobs for his Wendy-mother, trying to hide in what remains of the coontail hat he’s wearing. The sound is sad, and broken, and something leaves the men at that, as I intended. “ It's a boy. Any man still want to put a bullet in him for playing Pan’s game?”  
  
There is a general silence, and only Smee meets my eyes, his lips in a tight line that is not quite a frown. I put the gun back in the holster, bringing my hand to the new nick gracing my ribcage. “Throw him in the brig with his marbles and a blanket, but don’t leave him a candle. The rest of you prepare Long Tom for target practice.”  
  
XXXX

  


Sometimes I sit down at my desk to write before I retire for the evening and find that I have run out of vellum in my journal, or that the scant few pages remaining are not enough to hold whatever mark I have to put down. Surprisingly, I have never run out of journals, and that interests me, because Pan cannot read them and yet shows a persistent fascination with watching my collection grow. Many of them look the same, memories of a life gone upon one shelf, and the never ending tale that is this one copied countless times over into each fresh volume on another. There was a time of madness for me, a lapse in sanity shortly after my arrival that I am ashamed to recollect but cannot erase, because on the rare occasion, I open what I suppose is a new journal only to find my ranting tucked haphazardly within its pages.  
  
I find one such tonight, when I lash my windows against Pan’s fury and presence and claim my chair and quill instead. It captures my attention, this early passage, because it is from a time that I don’t remember, and the sound of my own voice is a curious thing in retrospect, full of youth and confusion as any man might expect of a new captain lost in a sea that knows no bounds. I wrote that I felt this was different, that this mist I’d encountered was unholy, supernatural and surely to bring death to my men and my beloved vessel. My topographer was among the first to go mad and throw himself over the bow, but I’d never placed much stock in scholars to begin with, and trusted the stars to see me to land.  
  
They would have, if Pan hadn’t made them lie to me. It was a dark moment for me, that I put the ink into these morbid words and questioned myself. My men hadn’t lost their faith yet, but every night we spent without a sunrise was something that I couldn’t ignore. The time never seemed to move, but the rolling of my deck and the quiet mutter of my sails told me that it had to. I wrote that I felt the ocean around me; that the horizon had tipped on its edge and lied as to where the good earth was hiding…that I was among the stars, and felt them passing with every shift of that dark mist. I’m not sure why I was chosen as Pan’s adversary, why he plucked me out of the Royal Fleet to know his game, but at the time of this passage, I was just a man worried for the lives of his crew on a voyage gone astray. I still spoke of Smee as a ‘Sir’ and a ‘Master’, not the old dog he’s come to my familiarity and friendship as. I was a man of honor and opportunity, here upon these pages.  
  
I have suddenly lost interest in writing, but I do so not for the creative thrill of seeing my thoughts laid out more neatly than they ever occur in my head, but from habit. It has been a long while since I kept a journal that was anything more than a mere tally of the men and death, and the suffering I have known since coming here. What captures my attention further, and stills my heart, is the dawning realization, that that beautiful scripture lining these timeless pages is that of my original hand. I have had to relearn the art, in a painstaking lesson, and my eyes find the journal in green leather across the room even now, where I spent hours mastering my letters with the quill in foreign fingers. My ship moves, Tootles lies sleeping in my brig, and every man upon this ship is captive. I dip the quill anyway, watching the tallow dance for a long moment before I put it to the page and draw a long line between the memory and the small blank expanse above it. Two pages more, front and back, a tale of a quiet fear and faith in God, and I draw another, below the line that marks my signature and the date. I cannot remember the last time I dated a passage. Thus framed, the glimpse at my travel to Neverland becomes obsolete and immortal, as I’m sure my legacy did back in the World of Men, because I sailed that damned mist five times before Neverland became the last shore that I would ever see.  
  
I turn to the beginning of the small book, pulling the corner of the ear straight again to begin the next tally. It is harder than I care to admit to pull my eyes from the sliver of darkness within the paper’s fall, but that was the first step to my madness, that moment of question. I think that if I’d dropped anchor, heeded men wiser than I in the matters of the wind and the fate of the wayward waves, I would still be a man of honor, and those same would live yet…but no man of that crew, no name in that passage save Smee remains with me, and their bodies might still trail the Jolly Roger’s wake if I care to look. I don’t. I courted madness once, and it left me fractured. I have found my understanding now, of this world and its master, and the old world gods are having their fun with me as the price of it all. There are books that I don’t read, and there are books that I have burned.  
  
We lost four men today that could not be saved or had no will to. I have gained a small foothold in the banter, but the new side of Pan is proving to be more chaotic, more reckless than anything I have encountered thus far. I will wait a day for the storm to calm, and if it doesn’t, we will set down in the cove and brace the rigging. There is no point in sending scouts from the men that he has granted me, because he will know them. Perhaps he might choose to ignore them, but it is easier to know for myself and keep him unaware. We will have a few hours before the fairies venture through the rain to find us missing from the harbor and warn him of our change, and a few after that before he makes some bold, vengeful move for the sake of his pride. We have never captured one before this, but the Lost Boys are loyal and thick as thieves…they will not ignore this slight. Wendy-mother’s fretting along with Pan’s general frustration with her will insure that this charge matters. I will take losses I am not prepared to if I allow them to come to the ship.  
  
It seems like a good day to give chase then, while Pan’s worry darkens the skies and bring the scent of tar and smoke from the wood. I will bring Tootles ashore and hide him, and the men and I will venture forward until the trees thicken and the rain ends. Perhaps, I add as an afterthought, I will leave Smee with the guard attending Tootles on the morrow…he will not sleep well, and the rain puts a burn in his joints.

  


XXXX

  


…We can’t wait the day. I don’t know what Wendy has done to the lad, but he’ll give my life to the sea if his temper doesn’t cool or find outlet soon, and he wants a fight. The number of heads aboard grows every time I blink, it seems, and I’m not willing to let the blow be greater than the spoils. We’re pulling to the cove and moving now.

  


XXXX  
  
I love Long Tom. I think that mistruth idly to myself as I stand in the hollow I created earlier, this hole of cannon-fire in the tree line. It was a display of power, a way for the men to vent their frustration, but it is hard to appreciate a new shadow on the horizon until one stands in it. The rain falls lightly on my weather coat and simple clothes, but a shuttered lantern illuminates a path of destruction a quarter-mile deep. Trees lay shattered, the scent of sap and dirt high and harsh in the air as they die, because Pan has not thought to mend the hole I’ve torn in his forest yet. I step into the hollow and glance at the sky overhead, a jagged streak of grey marring the canopy cover, a fitting image of my anger and I find myself idly hoping that he finds the damage masculine enough to be entertaining. I moving quietly, taking in the scene and counting the shots from memory as I trace their paths. It’s a while before I ever come across the first ball, and I do so by stepping on it, the leaves and mud crowding up to pull it into the earth. I should make a note to have the men reclaim them when we retreat. There’s no reason to waste the iron, especially with the tenuous trading agreement I have with the savages already leaving me penniless. I wonder idly to myself when I began to see every battle as ending in retreat.  
  
The woods are quiet, and I can hear the roll of the ocean dimly on the breeze. I can’t read this storm for some reason…the wind smells of lightning, but is hardly enough to stir my hair. The rain is quieter on the land than it ever will be on the sea, and it's odd to not feel the earth moving along with the air after so long at its mercy. I've done this too long to let it affect my gait, however, and the trees pass smoothly as I work my way deeper, past the last remnants of my temper and on towards Croc's Point. I don't know where I'm going, but I know the general area where my scouts never return from and that the savages look towards when Pan is spoken of. I don't know what I expect to find either, a cave made into living quarters, perhaps, or a hollowed tree as the fairies live. That would suit him. My shuttered candle hardly acts as a light, just a dim glow under the grey skies hiding the sun. The light is haunting, flickering with the movement of the clouds and the trees above, casting the world into a tarnished silver tone as Neverland breathes around me. The ground is soft enough at this point that I don't fear the sound of my boots, just the idle fairy that could happen by and misread my candle as someone to talk to. An hour passes, and a half more, just wandering the dark of the world and peering into shadows.  
  
I hear her before I can see her. Wendy and Tiger Lily, the savage princess, are the only two girls I know of on the island, and Tiger Lily would gag herself before she sobbed like this. I ease to a stop, listening carefully because the rain muffles the sound just a bit, but a moment later, I hear him, and I know what I've found. I wait, thinking this through, because I know roughly where I am and the trail that got me here, but is it worth risking a closer look now? I've only myself and the hook he granted me, my sword sheathed and the musket useless in this weather. If he startles, if my blade hisses clearing the sheathe and he recognizes the sound, I'll have Pan's rage and the Lost Boys down on my head...and I can't out run him. It'd be foolish. Curiosity begs the better of me, however, because I've never seen her, have I? This young scrap of a girl that fell from the sky so long ago, the one that has Peter so entranced that he forgets me entirely until he needs to beat something. I don't exactly relish the rank I've been given, truth be told. I wander a few steps closer, moving carefully, because the trees are not reliable cover and two steps that hide me here leave my left side completely exposed and so on. It takes a minute to listen, and sort out the voices, but she's stopped crying at least. I wonder if she only made the noise to draw him out. There is thunder over head, quiet and steady, a low rolling sound that curls over the treetops and on up the mountainside. It's a humbling thing, to know that the source of it is mere feet from me, but God, I hate him too much to give him proper due. My eyes narrow against the gloom, searching for something to betray him...her, rather. Pan is damn hard to see unless he's displaying himself.  
  
There, pressed against a tree...the white of her gown draws my eye. That's his work as well, and I wonder if she even knows it, that the fabric stays so bright when she lives with a bunch of foolish boys. Wendy. This is Wendy, in her nightgown and braided hair, war paint and feathers. The wind shifts and brings the scent of the savage's incense, but the rest is enough to tell the story. I don't know what she cries over, but Pan is not moved, trapping her against the tree to talk, because he is incapable of whispering. As an afterthought, I kill the flame of my candle, settling into stillness to listen, if there's anything to be heard.  
  
She's pretty...by the old-world standards, or at least by those of a man who's not seen a woman in the better half of a century. The blood is plain, nothing noble or Puritan, just a slight set to her chin and a round mouth. The light steals all but the color of her hair from me, and the rain has darkened it to match the bark of the tree she's held against. She's got a scrap of cloth in her hand, and as she talks, she's trying to brush the native paint from her features. I don't think she ever wanted it there to begin with. She ducks her head to hide, and Pan follows the motion, refusing to let her drop her eyes, and God, I know how frustrating that is, that he won't allow one the privacy of their own mind when he's talking. I hazard a step or two closer, but the words get no clearer...phrases, broken bits of thought that I can't make sense of. Eventually, she stops, however, and Pan talks to her.  
  
I've never seen him at this, either, pleading, pleasant Pan trying to work his way back into the good graces of someone who doesn't want him. It's odd to see him bow his shoulders to make her feel tall, rest his head against hers to make her feel special. I have to wonder where Tinkerbell is in all of this, because I don't see the sprite allowing this on a regular basis, but Pan tells me differently. Wendy makes another point, standing her ground, and I hear the shift in temper before it ever reaches the sky, crackling lightening to brighten the world for a moment and my heart stops, because I had not realized how exposed I was until the light returned. It fades almost immediately, but I face another threat when Pan turns away from her and takes a step in my direction, his expression dark and glaring out at the trees. By some miracle, he misses me. Wendy regrets whatever she's said. Her arms cross tight over her stomach as she turns her chin and contemplates the best way to resolve what is on the verge of being an argument. Pan's temper has a shorter fuse than mine, and that's a claim. I see now, though, the reason perhaps. Winding across his chest, the warpaint takes the shape of hands, black as ebony and reserved for high honors. There are four. The correlation tests my restraint, but those are lives he's wearing on his skin, marks of fallen enemies. I have to remind myself that I didn't know them, and that he willed them into existence to suit his twisted sense of adventure, but he intended to come to my ship like this, wearing those men in ash and memory.  
  
Tiger Lily bestowed those. Her name has never sounded less like a flower and more like filth until Wendy spat it upon the ground, tears in her eyes. Another has touched her Peter...her dear, dear Peter, and he doesn't feel the guilt of it. How can he? He's as confused as she is by his lack of response, but the lad doesn't know the truth of jealousy. It's a matter of possession, and he has not given himself to the savage. Wendy's hurt is lost on him. The girl seems to follow my logic a moment, later, because I watch the fight go out of her shoulders. She steps away from the bark, but Peter has his shoulders back, his chin high and half-black with the paint of warlord. He can see himself as nothing less. Wendy presses at his arm, and he turns further away, wounded without reason, but she doesn't let him go. I can hear her voice, quiet and soft under the rain falling, but I cannot fathom her intention until the rag makes itself known. My eyes narrow further, fully expecting Pan to take her hand off, or at least dart out of reach to keep his marks of honor, but the girl presses her lips to his arm and he doesn't move. Pan tenses under the touch, but the cloth begins working the mark of the other girl away without interruption. Wendy kisses him again, higher, and he leans as though that will stop her, but he doesn't want her to. This is what he spoke of, why he has been out for my blood and attention for the last few weeks; this is the start of something that he doesn't know how to control. She's hesitant, and sweet, clearing the first away and searching for a cleaner corner of fabric to start the next. The dye is made of ash and indigo, and she'll not cleanse him of all of it, but I suppose the handprints are what bother her. It's a matter of pride.  
  
Her mouth works along his collar, and the fierce expression cannot outlast the touch. His shoulders ease, slowly, because Pan never just gives up when he thinks he's won something, and somehow he does. She tugs his arms down, away from his chest so that she can continue her work, talking quietly to him until that tension eases almost completely. I take a step closer to the tree regardless, because on the off chance that she irritates him again, I don't think he'd miss me twice. The rag is cloying now, doing less to remove the third print as destroy its outline. It removes a bit of the color, but the left wing of his collar and up is stained with blue. I can't wrap my head around this...change in him, still, but I might have an idea as to how she does it now...and he folds quickly once she reaches his throat.  
  
I can see his eyes haze from here, and I remember that look, with more clarity than I care to confess to. The touches are simple, soft brushes of her mouth as his hands find her sides. The rag dips lower, to the inset of his hip, and she has to push the leather of his sword-belt aside to reach the last. His head tilts, eyes falling closed as a cat might, if one properly scratched its ears and was rewarded with mutual affection. She reaches the hollow of his ear, and I realize that I've tilted my head in the same manner, and something should end this. I don't know why I'm still standing here, why twenty minutes have gone to watching this play out, but I can see him shiver under her touch, the way his fingers tighten. I know what his mouth tastes like, what he feels like in my lap, and her hand comes up to pet through his hair and coax his lips into reach, and there's a coal in my chest, because I know his skin smells of smoke and rain. My eyes can't focus, not on her mouth, not on his, not on his throat and the blue smear on his skin, the dark one that she's making because she's lost track of the paint now and is just tracing circles over his lower stomach with the fabric, and now the wind picks up.  
  
I can hear the trees groan; wonder if he's done it just to hide his own sound, but the thought won't materialize itself in my head. Neither will any other, because it's too late to turn away from this, somehow, and I can see it happen, when the wall comes down and he wants something. It's the bright spark of sunlight in my eyes, glinting off of his sword as he crosses my hook again, just to hear it ring, just to smirk at me over the steel and promise my death. It's that bright cascade of water from the mountain, when he wishes to cool himself, it's every flower he's ever created, it's a decision, and I don't know what to make of it...and neither does Wendy. He turns, puts her against the tree, and this, this I have not seen, this demand he's making against her young mouth. Her nails clutch at him at first, tight, holding him close but that doesn't last, because he's...learned.  
  
The world goes quiet for a moment when I realize that. He's learned. From me. That tilt of the head, the motion of it, I know exactly what he's done to her and the second that it overwhelms the poor thing. And I can feel guilt, I know what he does not, why those lines are in place and ought not to be pushed, and he claims she's touched him, but this is Wendy pushing him away now. I'm stunned, in my own right, and I can see his reluctance, but there's no mistaking that, and she can't handle it. He pulls her against him, but she turns her head and they stay like that for a moment, her eyes wide and cheeks bright as she stares into the woods. I can almost feel Neverland's heart beating through the ground, hear his racing because he can't breathe and he doesn't want to. She pushes again, and he lets her go, watching her work her way through the trees back to the Burrow. She's not walking in a straight line, touching her lips and clutching at her gown, worried and tense, dazed by the force of that encounter.  
  
The change in Pan is evident, and startling, when he turns around. He scowls at the earth, takes two steps and leaps into the air, out of my line of sight almost instantaneously as he weaves through the trees.  
  
I don't know what to make of this. I've forgotten, about the men huddled in a miserable camp on the shore, about Smee, and the captured boy I've got at the fire. My eyes are glued to the blue scrap of fabric she's left upon the ground, the only evidence that I didn't imagine the sordid event in the dark corner of my obsession. I turn back, and it's getting brighter, the sun rising somewhere behind the storm and brightening that gray cast. It's hard to tell if I'm better off with or without the candle because when I turn and start to walk, I am still unsure of my destination. Away from this, I know, I'm walking away from the image burning itself into my brain, because Pan is about now, and the storm echoes his mood with a growing hostility. I'd be wise to head back to the ship, to warn the crew that the savages might be sided with Pan in the next round, but that is not the direction my feet are taking me. I am without a light, wandering aimlessly towards the shore. She didn't deserve that...and that was my fault. I hate Pan, I hate him so clearly I can taste it when I wake in the mornings, and it makes every movement bitter, every thought tainted, but I cannot explain this. This isn't what he's meant to be. This is wrong.  
  
And he lied to me.  
  
I come upon Croc's Point and pause there, staring at the water and the smoothly rippling surface because it’s very like my head at the moment. Never still, but clearer than I wish for it to be, because I know what I've done, and that it cannot bode well for the future. I have told Pan no, but what does a God listen to its subjects? What does he care? He's broken the code we've upheld for so long by entreating my company and nothing more. He's dared to enter my private chambers alone. He's touched me, without a weapon drawn. Why had I not seen these things until now? And furthermore, why do they suddenly matter? He wants to be a man...to be a boy and know all there is to know of the world and people, and he can't. It will kill him. I'm sure of it. That isn't the death I have planned for him. That is no victory, that's merely...  
  
But God, Pan dying. Pan, dead, at my feet, never to fly again, never to mock and crow of my stupidity, my helplessness--  
The rage takes me so suddenly I can't see, familiar and warm and bitter as brandy. I close my eyes to it, letting the rush ease through my system, and just as it always does, the blood-locked stump of my forearm begins to throb when my heart races. I cannot have even that small pleasure, to know that elevation, without reliving the misery he's brought me.  
  
I'm aware of his presence in the same moment that he hits me, some inelegant grunt on my tongue as the boy materializes in my side with immense force, taking me to the ground with him. My candle flies from my hand into the water, and I can't recover fast enough to get it on my sword after that before he's got a dagger to my skin. I can feel it, the edge dull by my standards and probably perfect by his...dull edges do more damage, and he doesn't have the worry of shaving. My ears will never grow used to the sound of metal grating down metal, and I'm holding back a torrent of my own blood by catching this point and feeling the leather brace slip in the water on my skin. My hook is not reliable; it's just vicious, a brutal symbol of the cruelty inflicted upon me that has poisoned every thought to enter my head since. I hate this boy.  
  
He is beautiful. Deified and powerful, wearing the storm and his anger like an extension of himself as his full weight rests on my chest, his grip savage and his eyes dark. I can feel his heart beating in the rain. The light is blue and silver, muting everything else, but he is one with this world, with Neverland and all that it is. It breathes with him, water curling through his hair and down his chest, taking blue ash and dirt from his skin, and the blood would be black, wouldn't it?  
  
I want to hurt him. I want to cause him pain, hear those sounds again and see what the world would have to do to cover his whimpers, to hide his damned shame, because I will leave him nothing else. His nails are sharp through my coat's sleeve, short as they are. The power humming just over my heart makes every breath a fight, and my hook slips, his dagger pressing a sharp hollow into my throat where the blood runs thickest, and I can't fathom it ending here, this is not my death.  
  
He's in my head. Our frustration, our rage, tuned together, that's how he found me and I can feel him now...what right does he have to my rage? I see Wendy in my mind's eye, pinned beneath that chest and those eyes, and this is a god, mocking a true child for the sake of his own curiosity, this isn't right. This is a god. Pan is not a child. He's raping one.

  


I will _kill_ him.

  


The thought needs no further translation between us; he heard that decision in my head with a clarity that wasn't even present the day he took my hand from me. He heard me, I can see it in his eyes, and there's some bestial sound in my chest as I throw myself out of the dirt, his hand abandons my wrist for my hair to take my throat wide--  
  
Misses his stroke, opens me instead just at the corner of my jaw, small and fierce, the blood is warm running to my collar. My hook catches at the hilt and tears the blade from his hand. I hear him hiss, but I'm not thinking, I'm not, I want to break him. I want to take him apart at every joint and drag his immortal spirit through the salt water because I was a man that knew God once, the true god, I was a man that lived with honor and righteousness, I was a sane, man, once--and he will give me none of it back. I will have nothing of that life for myself, not the pride, not the joy, and the vices, and the despair, all of it is lost to me. There is only one other soul on this island who can even approach that pain and she is nothing but a slip of girl in the thrall of a demon who will show her an agony she's never dared to dream of....that I taught him. I refuse.  
  
For the love of God, I intend to, at least. I will split him from chin to belt, pry his ribs open and spill all that is Pan upon the ground to mingle with the dirt and the rain, I will end him. My fist makes a brilliant connection with his jaw; I can feel it crack under the blow. His air leaves him, and even with all of his weight, he's still a boy, sixteen years at most trapped under me as I let my rage carry the motion through. His fist is deep in my hair, adjusts to wrap the base of my skull and snap it against the root of a tree, buried in the mud. The fight is close and bated; every motion I make is trapped in the depth of his power and doesn't feel like enough. Above him, I feel the cut welling and the blood trickling down the line of my jaw into my beard and spattering onto his chest and arms, and below him again, I feel his knee dig into the tender of my belly until it nigh touches my spine. There isn't a thought in my head other than that the wrong one of us is bleeding. We roll again, and he manages to kick away from me and catches my hook at an odd angle, putting sharp pain directly over that thin skin covering the stump, and some sharp breath of pain leaves me. He's backed himself to the water now, slipping and sputtering as I find my knees and clutch the metal to my stomach to right it again, securing the brace properly over my left forearm and breathing tightly because that's fire, pure fire and hatred embodied in my scars. I lunge for him and hook his belt, holding him within reach and down, because he's flying back but not away, as though he's wanted this fight. He has. I can see it in his eyes, feel it in his desperation because the bastard is still in my head, and I will give it to him. Down, my other hand finds some patch of skin above his navel and I force him down into the cool water, my clothes already so heavy with it that I feel as though time itself has slowed. I claw myself higher upon his person, adding my weight to the factor, taking his limber frame down into the water until my hand finds his throat at last. Our feet kick and drag in the mud at the shore, it's hardly four inches of water that cover his face, but the bubbles of his air escaping are possibly the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. His eyes are so bright and so dark, that rage still present, feeding off of me, and the water comes in waves from the sky until the pool shakes and ripples with the force of it, but Pan is still looking at me. I see him, feel his heart racing under my palm and his power shivering the water the around us, humming through my forearm like the lowest rumble of thunder shaking my nerves. He fights, fights as hard as he can, because I am breaking rules. He chooses what aspects of mortality he enjoys to mimic, and breathing, being warm and alive and pulsating as though he has a finite end is one trait that he has always adhered to. Pan is a god, and Pan bleeds, he breathes and shifts and acknowledges pain as he so chooses, so to force him here to drown...  
  
To make him acknowledge that we are not the same, and not on his terms, is an insult of the highest order, and I know the grin on my features in maniacal, but I wish he would fake his own death purely for my satisfaction. Give me a second's pleasure in the idea that I drowned, Peter, Pan.  
  
He won't. I see the decision in his head when he's had enough and that power cycles in and returns like an indrawn breath and then he throws himself out of the water with more force than any mere boy could muster. Pan is not a real boy, I am a Man, and he follows me, breathless and screaming in his rage. I feel that power tighten, on my mind, on my heart, the sole bearer of his attention in that moment as he pushes, and my shoulders hit the base of the tree he was so fond of perching in. His knees land to either side of my hips, my grip is lost in the force of it and my head is spinning; I can feel his fists tighten in my shirt as he coughs and spits and _pretends_.  
  
I move again, leaning forward to take it back, some measure of the control, any of it, and his power is behind the motion when he pulls me forward and slams me back into the bark again. I can't breathe as he meets my eyes and his are hazed, unseeing and...Pained, and he's acting, lying, he has to be. I have never hurt Peter Pan. Never, not even in our most desperate fights have I ever caused him the hurt that I intended. He presses me there, his grip shaking, and I can feel his breath fighting my own as his teeth hover bared over my mouth as though he had fangs to tear it with. The pain in my head is bright, but I see and feel that look, and he doesn't move, breathing, hovering as closely as he dares until he folds...lowers his head, smelling the blood on my skin until I get my hands to his chest and push, feeling the last traces of the paint shift like sand over his rabbit-scream heart. He sways back, and forward, putting his teeth to my throat harshly and the cut there brings me back to myself when he sways away again, hair in his eyes, something soft and lost and vicious on his features. He stumbles back from me, drunken steps and blood on his chin as he staggers to his feet and back into the water and then the air, gone with the breeze and another bit of my sanity gone with him. Pan is...insane.

  



End file.
